Leading film critic Andrew Sarris has died at 83

By HILLEL ITALIE -
Associated Press -
Wednesday, June 20, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) - Andrew Sarris, a leading movie critic during a golden age for reviewers who popularized the French reverence for directors and inspired debate about countless films and filmmakers, died Wednesday. He was 83.

Sarris died at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan after complications developed from a stomach virus, according to his wife, film critic Molly Haskell.

Sarris was best known for his work with the Village Voice, his opinions especially vital during the 1960s and 1970s, when movies became films, or even cinema, and critics and fans argued about them the way they once might have contended over paintings or novels.

No longer was the big screen just entertainment. Thanks to film studies courses and revival houses, movies were analyzed in classrooms and in cafes. Audiences discovered such foreign directors as Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, rediscovered older works by Howard Hawks, John Ford and others from Hollywood, and welcomed new favorites such as Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese.

Filmmakers were heroes and critics were sages, including Sarris, Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann and Manny Farber.

Sarris started with the Voice in 1960 and established himself as a major voice in 1962 with the essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory.” Acknowledging the influence of French critics and even previous American writers, Sarris argued for the primacy of directors and called the “ultimate glory” of movies “the tension between a director’s personality and his material.”

He not only helped write the rules, but filled in the names. He was a pioneer of the annual “Top 10” film lists that remain fixtures in the media. In 1968, he published “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968,” what Sarris described as “a collection of facts, a reminder of movies to be resurrected, of genres to be redeemed, of directors to be rediscovered.” Among his favorites: Ford, Hawks, Orson Welles and Fritz Lang. Categorized as “Less Than Meets the Eye”: John Huston, David Lean, Elia Kazan and Fred Zinnemann.

The critic himself would be criticized, especially by his enduring rival, Kael, a West Coast-based reviewer who in 1967 was hired by The New Yorker. In the 1963 essay “Circles and Squares,” Kael mocked Sarris‘ ideas as vague and derivative, trivial and immature. She later wrote off the auteur theory as “an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence.”

Athough Kael herself went on to celebrate such directors as Altman and Brian De Palma, the two never reconciled and friends divided into “Sarristes” and “Paulettes.” When Kael died, in 2001, Sarris acknowledged that they “never much liked each other” and added that he found her passing less upsetting than the demise days earlier of actress Jane Greer.

“They go together like Petruchio and Kate, Zeus and Hera, Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King,” Kent Jones wrote in Film Comment in 2005 about Sarris and Kael. “Despite the fact that they shared certain predilections and preferences (for Godard in the Sixties, Altman in the Seventies, and `The Earrings of Madame de…’ now and forever), they never stopped battling after 1963.”

Kael aside, Sarris was greatly admired by his peers and even some directors. “Citizen Sarris,” a collection of essays about the critic published in 2001, included contributions from critics Roger Ebert and David Thomson, and from filmmakers Scorsese, John Sayles and Budd Boetticher. Scorsese, with whom Sarris briefly shared an office at New York University, praised him as “a fundamental teacher” and credited him for helping Scorsese “see the genius in American movies.”

Sarris was a heavyset and sad-eyed man, a deeply knowledgeable, elegiac critic with a notable willingness to admit error. He dismissed Billy Wilder in 1968 as being “too cynical to believe even his own cynicism,” then years later (with a nudge from Francois Truffaut) said he was wrong. After initially panning Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: Space Odyssey,” he gave the 1968 film another try _ under different circumstances _ in 1970.

“I must report that I recently paid another visit to Stanley Kubrick’s `2001’ while under the influence of a smoked substance that I was assured by my contact was somewhat stronger and more authentic than oregano on a King Sano (cigarette) base,” he confided.

“Anyway, I prepared to watch `2001’ under what I have always been assured were optimum conditions, and surprisingly (for me) I find myself reversing my original opinion. `2001’ is indeed a major work by a major artist.”

Sarris was born in Brooklyn in 1928, the son of a real estate investor who lost much of his fortune during the Great Depression. (Always broke, but never poor, was how Sarris remembered his childhood.)